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AP Photo/Rick Scuteri President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd while speaking at a rally in Phoenix. W ith his job-approval ratings unable to break 40 percent these days, President Donald J. Trump needs his base more than ever. And that base, so carefully cultivated by Trump and the likes of Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, has an obsession with race. Trump’s decision to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program , more commonly known by its initials—DACA—is but the latest in a series of moves designed to signal to the racists and nativists who spread the Trumpian gospel during the presidential campaign that he’s still their guy. And is he ever. DACA, of course, is the program created by former President Barack Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to avoid deportation by registering with the government. Now the government has their information, and is yanking the program in March. The president, knowing of the...

AP Photo/Alex Brandon President Donald Trump climbs into a Pierce firetruck during a "Made in America," product showcase at the White House in Washington. P resident Donald J. Trump really likes fire engines. They’re big. They’re red. They’re shiny. And because he’s president, he can get up in one whenever he wants to . On Tuesday in Corpus Christi, Texas, as Houston lay drowning, Trump admired an adoring, pre-screened crowd from atop the bumper of a firetruck parked at a rural firehouse. “What a crowd,” the president said, as if he were addressing a campaign rally. “What a turnout!” During a press event with Texas Governor Greg Abbot, Trump had to stop himself mid-sentence from congratulating the governor and himself for a job well done, even as the disaster wrought by Hurricane Harvey continued to unfold in Houston and beyond. “We won’t say congratulations until it’s over,” he said . “We’ll do that later.” But he did promise his audience that "we’re going to get you back and...

(AP Photo/Matt York) Phoenix police used tear gas outside the Phoenix Convention Center where Trump hosted a rally on August 22, 2017. T here comes a point during the unfolding of a relentless, long-form catastrophe that one fears running out of adjectives to describe it. Watching President Donald J. Trump’s disgusting Tuesday night rally, this writer finds the majesty of the English language failing her with means adequate to convey the depths of her disgust and dismay. Speaking at a campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona, barely more than a week after white supremacists wreaked mayhem on the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump chose to exacerbate the racial tensions he has relied upon to maintain his power, leading a body of the United Nations to sound an alarm . Beginning with a lengthy harangue against the media, Trump lied by both omission and commission . He complained that reporters did not report his begrudging condemnation of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who...

(Photo: Adele M. Stan) White men dressed to emulate the golfing attire of President Trump march in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying Confederate flags and the flag of a neo-Nazi group. Some wore campaign hats. T he current president of the United States has his own little army of men who play by no rules, many armed to the teeth with assault rifles, all who chant racist slurs, usually bearing some implement that can be used as a weapon—a lit torch, a flagpole, a stick, a club, a homemade shield deliberately crafted with sharp edges. And he means to keep them in his service. Congressional leaders, meanwhile, have demurred when asked if they would hold hearings on the spread of violent white nationalism in the wake of the Charlottesville violence. These Republicans know on which side their bread is buttered—the crusty side labeled “hate.” In a press conference on Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump partially walked back the blanket condemnation of neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, and white...

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) President Trump boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on August 4, 2017, en route to New Jersey for his summer vacation at his Bedminster golf club. I recall being lined up with my classmates in the corridor of my elementary school, told to kneel with our heads to the wall as a test siren bellowed. The United States, I knew, was having what the grown-ups called a Cold War, which made little sense as a description for circumstances that could culminate in the incineration of New Jersey. The hallway exercise was absurd, of course. Sitting a stone’s throw from the tank farms of the Bayway oil refinery, a nuclear strike by the Soviet enemy anywhere in the vicinity would have left our little town in ashes. It was all quite tense and terrifying—even if the leaders with their fingers on the button were presumed to be reasonably level-headed. Today, two narcissists, concerned only with winning a competition for the World’s Most Dangerous Man, are...